Azure Front Door Benefits and Use Cases for Scalable Applications

Azure Front Door is a highly available and scalable service that can handle large volumes of traffic. It's designed to provide a single entry point for all users, making it easier to manage traffic and reduce latency.

With Azure Front Door, you can route traffic to multiple origins, including Azure Load Balancer, Azure Application Gateway, and third-party services. This allows for greater flexibility and scalability.

One of the key benefits of Azure Front Door is its ability to detect and route around issues with individual origins, ensuring that your application remains available even if one of the origins is experiencing issues. This is achieved through its built-in health checks and routing capabilities.

Azure Front Door is a cloud-based service that delivers applications faster and more reliably by distributing traffic across multiple regions and endpoints. It uses layer 7 load balancing to achieve this.

This service also offers dynamic site acceleration (DSA) to optimize web performance and near real-time failover to ensure high availability. You don't have to worry about scaling or maintenance because Azure Front Door is a fully managed service.

To ensure optimal performance, you should only allow traffic that comes from Azure Front Door to reach your origin. This means unauthorized or malicious requests will be denied access and encounter the security and routing policies of Front Door.

Here are some next steps to learn more about Azure Front Door:

Azure Front Door offers several benefits that make it an attractive solution for businesses. It enables the creation of modern internet-first architectures that have dynamic, high-quality digital experiences with highly automated, secure, and reliable platforms.

With Azure Front Door, you can accelerate and deliver your app and content globally at scale to your users wherever they are. This allows you to compete, weather change, and quickly adapt to new demand and markets.

Azure Front Door also intelligently secures your digital estate against known and new threats with intelligent security that embraces a Zero Trust framework.

Azure Front Door is a game-changer for businesses looking to create modern internet-first architectures. It enables you to build and operate highly automated, secure, and reliable platforms for dynamic, high-quality digital experiences.

With Azure Front Door, you can accelerate and deliver your app and content globally at scale to your users, creating opportunities for you to compete, weather change, and quickly adapt to new demand and markets.

Azure Front Door intelligently secures your digital estate against known and new threats with intelligent security that embraces a Zero Trust framework. This means you can have peace of mind knowing your digital assets are protected.

Here are some key benefits of using Azure Front Door:

Azure Front Door is being used by customers to deliver worldwide performance optimization, connecting users to the closest 'Microsoft fiber'. This results in optimized performance with modern architecture.

Dematic chose Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) on Azure Front Door to protect its web applications from web-based attacks and malicious bots.

Azure Front Door provides a secure internet perimeter for your applications, protecting them from various threats. This includes built-in layer 3-4 DDoS protection, which safeguards against large-scale attacks.

With Web Application Firewall (WAF) seamlessly attached, you can protect your applications against layer 7 DDoS attacks. For more information, see Application DDoS protection.

Azure Front Door also offers Bot manager rules based on Microsoft’s own Threat Intelligence, helping you detect and block malicious actors.

You can privately connect to your backend using Private Link and adopt a zero-trust access model.

A centralized security experience for your application is provided via Azure Policy and Azure Advisor, ensuring consistent security features across apps.

Here are some key security features of Azure Front Door:

To get started with Azure Front Door, you'll need to configure it by creating a front door instance. This is done through the Azure portal, where you can select the pricing tier and choose the regions where you want to deploy your front door.

Azure Front Door supports multiple deployment options, including manual deployment, Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, and Azure CLI. Manual deployment is a straightforward process that involves creating a front door instance and configuring its settings.

You can also use ARM templates to automate the deployment process, which can be especially useful for large-scale deployments. By using ARM templates, you can define the resources and configuration for your front door instance in a single file.

If you're considering Azure Front Door, you'll need to decide between Azure Front Door Standard and Azure Front Door Premium. The decision depends on whether the other features offered by Azure Front Door Standard and Azure Front Door Premium are required.

For enterprises that host scalable content, Azure Front Door is the way to go. It's designed to handle large amounts of traffic and data.

When evaluating pricing, review the monthly charges, hourly billing, and extra charges for custom rules. This will help you determine which tier fits your budget.

Azure Front Door Standard is a good choice for content optimization without extensive security capabilities. It's a solid option for those who need to deliver content quickly and efficiently.

On the other hand, Azure Front Door Premium is the better option for enhanced security requirements. If you need advanced security features, this is the tier for you.

Here's a quick comparison of the two tiers:

You should deploy an Application Gateway behind Front Door when you want to balance traffic not only globally but also within your virtual network. This is because Front Door can only do path-based load balancing at the global level, but Application Gateway can do it within your virtual network.

Another scenario is when you need Connection Draining, which Front Door doesn't support. Application Gateway can enable Connection Draining for your VMs or containers, ensuring a smooth transition.

If you want to offload all the TLS/SSL processing and use only HTTP requests in your virtual network, Application Gateway behind Front Door is the way to go. This setup can be achieved by deploying Application Gateway behind Front Door.

Lastly, if you want to use session affinity at both the regional and the server level, Application Gateway is the better choice. It can send traffic from a user session to the same server in the backend, whereas Front Door can only send it to the same backend in a region.

Here are the specific scenarios where you should consider deploying an Application Gateway:

You can deploy an Azure Load Balancer behind Front Door, but you'll need to have a public VIP or a DNS name that's publicly accessible.

Azure Front Door uses the public IP to route traffic to your origin, so make sure that's set up correctly.

A common scenario is to deploy an Azure Load Balancer behind Front Door, and it's a great way to distribute traffic and improve performance.

You can also use Private Link with Azure Front Door Premium to connect to an internal load balancer, which can be a good option if you have sensitive resources that need to be kept private.